


La Muse Malade

by Sjukdom



Series: La Folie Verte [2]
Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 18:39:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6435853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sjukdom/pseuds/Sjukdom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I offer you to draw on him. Maybe, you should try the different canvas?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	La Muse Malade

**Author's Note:**

> This part was inspired by Charles Baudelaire's poem "La Muse malade" ("The Sick Muse"). I put its lines as the epigraph. The English translation is made by Roy Campbell.

_“Le succube verdâtre et le rose lutin_  
_T'ont-ils versé la peur et l'amour de leurs urnes?_  
_Le cauchemar, d'un poing despotique et mutin_  
_T'a-t-il noyée au fond d'un fabuleux Minturnes?"_

_“Green succubus and rosy imp — have they_  
_Poured you both fear and love into one glass?_  
_Or with his tyrant fist the nightmare, say,_  
_Submerged you in some fabulous morass?”_

The house produced its own kind of music, a whole orchestra of shuddering windowpanes, sighs of tired floorboards, accompanied by nearly constant tinkling of glass and - right now - soft scratching of brush against paper. Ed listened to it specifically, trying to guess the movements of Oswald’s hand behind each scratch as the brush touched precious white surface. Up, to the right, leaving a wet trail of paint, a lost path in great ivory wood, shapeless, spaceless, timeless. Ed frowned, unable to comprehend what was the outcome of these movements. The picture held nothing in it. The labyrinth of paths, leading nowhere.

The sounds were fading, the brush stopped again and again before Oswald’s fingers let it go and it fell down with an inaudible thump, a final accord of broken melody, a dead end of another path. A man in the ivory wood would have fallen on his knees and cried out, finding no exit out of this white purgatory. Oswald only sighed discomposedly. Edward pushed away his glass and stood up to check what was upsetting Oswald.

He sat at the table, his eyes closed, head bowed to one side. The smell of The Green Fairy was in the air, but it was nowhere to be seen as if it had seen that even its green treasure was unable to help and fled. There was a sheet in front of Oswald, marked with a huge green spot that the brush left on it when it fell. The spot reminded the cloudy mind about a hateful grin, a farewell of the selfish Fairy, irritated that its gifts were used in vain. The rest of the sheet was covered with chaotic lines, thin, thick, straight and angled, all too different to present something whole.

“Unable to draw?” asked Edward carefully. Oswald didn’t move at the sound of his voice. Maybe, he had drunk so much in attempt to catch up with the flight of The Fairy that Ed’s voice was now for him just another chord in the house’s music, as meaningful as the whisper of wind among the curtains. Or the fall from the emerald skies had been so painful that this pain blacked out everything from the outside, turning into green bruises on the soul. Or he was too upset and confused with this failure that didn’t want to communicate. 

As Edward was probing these thoughts slowly through the net of poison drops that captured his mind, he heard Jim approaching the room with still solid steps, The Fairy not clinging to him, slowing him down with its forceful hands. If it left Oswald not to visit Jim, then whom? 

“As you see”, suddenly Oswald opened his eyes, where the verdant dawn was slowly consumed by the horrible sobriety of night. “The paper drinks it all. See? How pale the paint is. It doesn’t want to show. I can picture nothing.” 

Edward stroked Oswald’s shoulder blades gently. Jim stopped at the door, listening to them, probably thinking whether he should look inside and ask if they needed something. Well, they needed, badly. Under the clothes Oswald was cold with disappointment, a thin candlewick that lost its flame and stood dead and black, wax tears of loneliness frozen on their halfway down as if stopped by evil spell. 

“Come in now!” called out Edward. Oswald turned his head a little and looked at Jim appearing in the door frame with the same melancholy. He wore a bathrobe, not so impressive like the one that Oswald had, of course, blush crept up his usually pale neck and cheeks, wet hair clung to his head like petals of a flower that closed up for the night. Maybe, The Fairy visited him, after all, but was fought away with the hot and humid breath of bathwater. No wonder it was irritated with such disrespect. 

“Can he help you?” asked Edward, motioning to Jim to get rid of the bathrobe. He got thinner after he was introduced to The Green Fairy. It demanded the full attention, it was above everything, food, sleep, bath. Those who doubted it soon found out that the absence of The Fairy felt much worse than hunger or insomnia. Oswald, being tortured with this absence, looked at Jim’s naked body grimly, squinting as if its whiteness reminded him of the vast ivory woods he tried so helplessly to draw an exit from. 

“What should I do with him, draw him?” 

“Not him, actually”, explained Edward kindly to no one of them in particular. The Fairy finally found a shelter inside him and was twirling with excitement, tickling his ribs with its wings and hitting his heart like a tiny fleshy drum, making it beat faster and faster. Edward left the giggle of The Fairy escape his throat. “On him, more likely. Maybe, you should try the different canvas?" 

Edward reached out for the paper and torn it in half at first and kept tearing it until the cursed woods disappeared under the heavy snowfall of small scraps. Oswald finally seemed to awake from the nightmares of the lost woods. He straightened up and looked at Jim more closely, the green light filling his eyes again. Jim stood motionlessly, his bathrobe lying at his feet as a liquid mass of torn poppies. Oswald gestured to him to come closer, his glance exploring the smooth surfaces of Jim's chest and stomach, the angles of ribs and hip bones bulging under brass skin as if he was thinking of how to use it all to the best effect. 

When Jim walked to the right spot, Oswald stopped him with his hands and reached out for his brush without looking. Edward handed it out to him, dipping it in paint before giving it out. Jim's skin was crawling and he rubbed it with his hands to smooth it down again so nothing would interrupt Oswald again. He stood with his hand raised a little, drops of paint falling to the floor with an uneven rhythm. Edward thought of going to his room to fetch his glass he could share, but Oswald seemed to come to a conclusion. 

He pressed the brush to the spot a bit lower Jim's collarbone, waited until the paint formed a perfect circle and slid it down, drawing another line, much firmer and calmer than before. The paint glistened like a trail of greedy wet kisses, left by the green lips of The Fairy. When the line reached Jim's nipple, Oswald moved his hand to the right, bifurcating the line in two. It was followed by other ones, thin, thick, straight and angled, but now they were weaving together, turning into something whole that was created by their embraces. The Green Fairy that was imprisoned in his glass was forgotten. The humble little part of it, good only for drinking, a small mercy of cruel creature. Now Ed was looking at its origins, at the glimpse of the world where The Fairy dwelt, however tiny this glimpse was. 

Another forest was growing out on Jim's skin, not the white wasteland of unseen ghosts, but the glorious woods of green madness, awoken to life by Oswald's hand. Warmed from Jim's blood, fed by his flesh, the woods dug their roots deeper into his underbelly, snaked their graceful trunks up his sides, sprouted their twigs towards his chin, their crazy-formed leaves tickling his nipples and armpits. The more Ed was staring at them the more he thought that the woods were indeed alive, twisting, moving, swaying like a crowd raging during danse macabre, quicker with each Jim's breath. The Green Fairy looked from behind each tree, mocking and teasing, but maybe it was the shadows that decided to participate, too. 

Oswald stepped back towards Ed, contemplating his creation, the woods no one feared to get lost in and never wished to find a right path out of them, the woods of unnatural mad shapes and time that went backwards. Jim, the living canvas, maintained his posture, afraid to disturb their mute existence. The paint was drying out on his body, filling the air with heavy oily smell. The music resumed itself, enriched by the sounds of The Green Forest coming alive. Oswald touched Edward's forearm with the other end of the brush. 

"Would you like to try and picture something? The light is good enough yet." 

He came alive with the woods, melancholy and disappointment sprawled across the floor in the shape of useless paper scraps. Ed took the brush and pointed it at Jim, drawing imaginary lines on the untouched parts of his body, arms and legs and buttocks, on the tender skin of his inner thighs and on even much more tender skin under his scrotum. 

He smiled. Absinthe in his glass seemed to evaporate, filling the whole house with poison fumes, the air of the woods depicted. The Fairy was here again, claiming back its forlorn kingdom, claiming back its servants, taking the blush from Jim's cheeks and replacing it with virid shadows. Edward hoped it would never forsake them again, if they would serve well. He lowered the brush and turned to get his glass. 

The Fairy was above all. 

And from now on it would never leave.


End file.
